Recovering Journalist

Twitter and Breaking News

Twitter can be maddening in many ways, a cacophony of voices with a lousy signal-to-noise ratio—does anybody really care what somebody else had for breakfast?

But one thing that Twitter excels in is breaking news. Its broadcast, real-time, 140-character headline nature makes it a perfect vehicle for the latest news, whether it's being generated by on-the-spot observers (or participants) and retweeted far and wide, or whether it's being used by news organizations to blast out their latest headlines.

The latter seems a slamdunk use of Twitter by news organizations—it's just a great headline distribution medium. You'd think that news media outlets would be taking advantage of this functionality to increase their reach and influence. But that's not necessarily the case.

Sure, just about every news organization has a Twitter feed or two. But not all of them promote them well (or tend them well). As a result, a list of breaking news feeds on Twitter shows a large disparity in the number of followers for the various sources. This list isn't meant to be comprehensive, though it includes most of the major news brands. But it is representative:

Source	Followers
New York Times	1,993,474
Time	1,670,519
NPR Politics	1,585,066
Breaking News Online	1,325,832
CBS News	1,286,393
Newsweek	925,910
ABCNews	787,833
CNN	547,785
HuffingtonPost	247,841
ESPN	180,473
NPR News	130,433
Fox News	107,818
Wall Street Journal	99,291
Reuters	43,886
MSNBC Breaking	36,228
WashingtonPost	34,556
Google News	24,576
Politico	22,089
YahooNews	4,004
AP	1,552

As you can see, there are some well-known news brands at the top—and some equally well-know news brands at the bottom. The New York Times, Time, NPR and CBS are reaching vast new audiences via Twitter; The Washington Post, Yahoo News and the AP (which should be a natural for a breaking-news headline product), not so much. Some big Web-only names like HuffingtonPost are doing well; others, like Google News, Politico and Yahoo News (the #1 Web news site), are also-rans.

But one of the big names on the list is not like the others: Breaking News Online, the upstart Twitter-only news headline service that has muscled its way near the top of this list, with more than 1.3 million followers. Run by a 19-year-old Dutch entrepreneur, Michael van Poppel, BNO has become an invaluable neutral source for news headlines as soon as they happen. Van Poppel and his small team scan major media sites (and do some of their own reporting) to produce BNO's breaking news feed, pumping out bite-sized news breaks in a manner that will bring a smile to any wire-service or news-radio junkie. They seem to have pitch-perfect news sense, which is essential for any good headline service.

The result: A startup news company with an audience that rivals those of the big traditional news sites on Twitter. Not too shabby. You have to wonder what also-rans like The Washington Post and MSNBC are thinking when they see a teenager beating them qualitatively and quantitatively in distributing breaking news to Twitter's news-junkie-heavy audience. As PaidContent recently wrote, "Hey Media Company. Buy BNO News. Now. Really."

Is there a business model for breaking news on Twitter? At first blush, you'd think not, since there doesn't seem to be any sort of business model for Twitter at the moment. But van Poppel may be a step ahead here, too. BNO now has an iPhone app that sells for $1.99—plus a 99-cent-per-month subscription fee. That might be a decent model to convince breaking news buffs to pay, gasp, a subscription fee for news on their phones (a natural mobile app). It will be interesting to see if BNO can make its subscription model work. At least it's trying.

In the meantime, Breaking News Online is another example of mainstream media being outflanked by an aggressive online startup. You'd think, given the popularity of Twitter among news types, that every major media outlet would have a mega-popular Twitter news operation. But only some do—and the rest are taking a backseat to a clever 19-year-old kid. Tweet that.

Addendum: Some Twitterati argue that inclusion on Twitter's Suggested User list—which new Twitter members see after signing up—skews the popularity of certain sites. Sure, the list—which has hundreds of suggestions, in random order—is probably one factor in driving popularity. But there are many others, and a big news organization that can only garner a few thousand Twitter followers is clearly just not taking advantage of the medium or marketing its feeds well (including lobbying Twitter for inclusion on the suggested list!). And now it appears Twitter is considering eliminating the Suggested Users list. That would level the playing field.

And That's The Way It Is

With the passing of Walter Cronkite, it will be interesting to see if there's a media frenzy that's anything like the over-the-top orgy of coverage and tributes the accompanied Tim Russert's death last summer. Cronkite was 10 times the journalist and historic figure that Russert was. But I suspect he won't get one-tenth the coverage. How sad. I hope I'm wrong.

R.I.P. Walter.

PS: Sitcom writer/sportscaster Ken Levine has a terrific and appropriately terse appreciation of Cronkite.

How Useful (and Usable) is Your Site?

The always-great John Temple has a valuable post today urging senior-level news executives to stay away from their print editions for a couple of weeks (painful as that may be for some). He suggests that they try relying solely on the Web for a while to get a better idea of how their increasingly digital audience is consuming news and information these days. 

If they would try this, I think newspaper executives would quickly see flaws in their offerings and would also more clearly understand the flood tide that is running. I'm not writing to criticize specifically what papers are doing online. Only to say that my experience being outside a newspaper tells me that other executives while they still have a chance might want to experience the world without their newspaper. I believe it would hasten their sense of urgency. I'm not talking about a sense of urgency about revenue. We know that's there in most buildings in this economic downturn. But is it there to the same degree in understanding audience and what's available to people today? Is it there in making sure their offerings stack up?

It's an excellent suggestion, and I'd take it a step farther: Every editor and publisher should spend some time trying to use their Web site the same ways that readers do, to truly find out what the user experience is for a site visitor. I think they'd get a jarring education in just how crappy and hard to use many (most? all?) newspaper sites are.

In fact, here's a little test that you can give your newspaper or broadcast site to find out how well it's serving the typical user. Try this list of tasks to see how your site measures up. I don't think you'll like what you see.

1. Without using search, find continuing, in-context coverage of a long-running local story.
2. Similarly (again, without using search), find a comprehensive package of information (even a collection of past stories) about a significant local icon or personality.
3. Locate all the coverage and information on the site about a specific local town. 
4. Starting on a story page (not the home page) quickly find other key information, e.g. the day's top headlines or most-read stories. (Remember, the vast number of readers don't enter your site from the home page, though print-focused newsies obsess about home pages.)
5. Find a list of the best local restaurants, or ratings and reviews of a particular kind of cuisine, preferably by locality (extra credit: user reviews). BTW: This is why Yelp is really hurting newspapers.
6. Find a local movie listing, or better yet, a local theater listing and review (extra credit: user reviews).
7. Find something a family can do for fun this weekend. 
8. Find any location mentioned on the site on a map—wait, no, you're not allowed to leave the site. No MapQuest or Google maps! 
9. Using the site's search function, search for a term you know appeared in the newspaper in the past 24 hours. 
10. Subscribe to your site's mobile alert function (you have one, right?) and see if it's truly useful. While you're at it, be sure to look at your site regularly on its iPhone or mobile version (you have one, right). Is it updated as frequently as the main site? 
11. Find something in the paper's archives.
12. How easy is it to e-mail a story, or print it out, or view it on a single page?  
13. Find a way to quickly contact a specific reporter, or an editor, or anybody at the paper. 
14. Find an ad you know is on the site. (This drives advertisers nuts, incidentally.) 
15. How easy is it to place a classified ad online—or to buy any kind of ad?
16. How easy is it to manage your print subscription online?
17. Using the site's search function, search for just about anything in the list above.
18. Now, try the same searches from Google.

I suspect very few traditional news sites will get even close to a passing grade on this test. You'll find that it takes four or five clicks to find that theater review and show time, or a list of the best restaurants (if it exists at all). You'll discover that there's no package of stories about the mayor. You'll be painfully aware of how inadequate your search function is. You'll see why your readers throw up their hands when they try to contact you with a problem, or to buy an ad. You'll realize that vast expanses of your site are all but invisible to Google.

Your readers already know all of this, and it drives them nuts—and it drives them away. These are basic blocking and tackling elements of good site design and usability, but newspaper sites—thrown together haphazardly over the years, without a good sense of what works on the Web and too many legacy bad habits from the print world—come up very, very short. This is how the increasing number of online-dominant readers view your news product. As John Temple said, you need to take a step back from print and view your site through their eyes.

Extra credit: This one's harder to do because it happens infrequently, but next time there's a major breaking news story in your area, try following it entirely through your site. If something's happening during the work day, that's where readers are going—not to local television. Similarly, if a major local news story breaks overnight, your site is the place people are going to look for information that's not going to make the next morning's paper.

There was an unfortunate example of the wrong way to cover breaking local news this week in Connecticut, where an ugly divorce-related hostage situation spilled over into the late-night hours. Most of the state's newspapers and TV stations didn't bother with it or used wires, but the Hartford Courant and New London Day sites stayed with it—up to a point. 

Even though the story's fiery ending came after midnight, the Courant's coverage weirdly signed off at about 10 pm (damn those Tribune Co. budget cuts). The Day stuck with it 'til the end, but its online coverage—like the Courant's abortive coverage—was disjointed, uneven and at times hard to comprehend, with copy that read like a strange combination of news story and newsblog, wild changes in tense, outdated information and an overwhelming sense that nobody in the newsroom was actually reading what was on the site. (And note to The Day: hitting "next" on a photo gallery should show the next photo, not reload the entire story page.) 

I'll bet traffic at both sites spiked because of interest in the dramatic situation. But the readers who came to those sites to find out what was going on deserved much better. Yes, a breaking news situation is hard to corral. But if you're going to try to cover breaking news online, think about serving the reader as well as possible, not just shoveling information onto the site and figuring you can clean it up in the next print edition. That's too way late.

This Just In: Michael Jackson, Still Dead

There's been a nagging suspicion in many enlightened journalistic quarters that the Michael Jackson story has been massively overplayed in the media, especially by TV news (even NBC Nightly News led with the story most nights last week, which was ridiculous). 

It was quite apparent that Baby Boomer media managers—out of touch with popular culture and audience interest, but obsessed with a performer from their youth who hasn't been relevant for years—were staying with the Jackson story even though they didn't understand that people really were over it. Indeed, Jeff Jarvis supplied some great data last week that showed that, measured by hard data on Internet searches and blog conversations, interest in all things Jackson had dropped precipitously after the first couple of days.

But the TV talking heads and cameras and helicopters droned on, providing unrelenting coverage on most of the major networks of a story that basically was over once the coroner declared the singer dead. This culminated with live coverage by most networks today of Jackson's funeral, in LA, replete with breathless predictions that hundreds of thousands of mourners would pack the streets around the Staples Center for his memorial service.

Um, not so much. The AP reports:

The traffic snarls and logistical nightmares that had been feared by police and city officials had not materialized. The thousands of fans with tickets began filing in early and encountered few problems, and traffic was actually considered by police to be lighter than normal.

"I think people got the message to stay home," said California Highway Patrol Officer Miguel Luevano. "When you have people staying home, it clears up those freeways."

Deputy Police Chief Sergio Diaz, operations chief for the event, said authorities had expected a crowd of 250,000. Besides reporters and those with tickets to the memorial service, the crowd around the Staples Center perimeter numbered only about 1,000, he said.

Only 1,000 people? When 250,000 were expected? That's some lousy predicting, but it was doubtless fed by media hype. We haven't seen the ratings yet on today's wall-to-wall coverage, but I suspect they're going to be similarly paltry (there's some indications of heavy Web traffic to streaming video of the memorial service, but that may reflect a curiosity factor that's going on while people are at work). Jackson's death was a big story, but it was over in a day or two. By sticking with it and flogging it, big media showed, once again, that it's out of step with its audience.

Update: Turns out the Jackson memorial service was boffo on the Internet. Go figure. But I suspect that had a lot to do with it happening while people were at work, and streaming the video on their office PCs. (Hell, I watched it, out of morbid curiosity.) As Dan Woog notes in the comments, Facebook saw a bunch of MJ-related activity, too, though nothing close to the Obama inauguration. But I think the lack of crowds in LA was very telling. And I hope that the story will just go away now. At least until the toxicology report is in!

The People Have Spoken

Nothing really new here, except that the numbers are becoming overwhelming: a new Zogby poll finds that most Americans prefer the Internet as a news source—more so than newspapers, TV and radio combined. Oh, and they consider the Internet more reliable than those other media, as well.

As if that wasn't bad enough news for the traditionalists, get this: only 1 in 200 of those surveyed—you read that right, 1 in 200, or one half of 1 percent—believe that newspapers will be a "dominant source" of news within five years. Would somebody please remember to turn out the lights in the pressroom?

Some interesting breakdowns within the numbers, though. Newspaper Web sites do well, with 41 percent of respondents describing them as important sources of news. Facebook scored 10 percent; Twitter scored 4 percent.

The usual caveats: 3,000 respondents, 1.8 percent margin of error. But that's still not enough to make the future of newspapers look any brighter. The readers are voting with their feet—or their fingertips and mice.

Hat tip to Greg Sterling for spotting this.

The Daily Show and The New York Times

The Daily Show's skewering of the newspaper business in general and The New York Times in particular was spectacular. Highlight—though some might not see it exactly that way: Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones asking Timesman Rick Berke to point out one thing in the "aged news" print newspaper that actually happened today. Um, um, um...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

Not pretty. But as we used to say in the newsroom in a slightly different context, truth is a defense. And in this case, savagely funny as hell.

And Never is Heard a Discouraging Word...

Jeff Jarvis, poking around lately in the post-modern world of advertising, has hit upon a scary thought: What if, basically, advertisers don't need media to reach audiences? What if advertising, as we know it, is irrevocably, irretrievably broken?

Jeff writes: 

So here's the real punchline: Advertising ends up having nothing to do with media. They become decoupled. Audience no longer yields advertising. Hell, advertising isn’t advertising. It’s relationships. Media only get in the way. There’s the corner we’re painted into, the chaos scenario, perhaps the doomsday scenario for media.

Doomsday scenario indeed. (Bob Garfield has presaged some of this thinking in his excellent Chaos Scenario, soon to be a book.) To put it another way: In a world where anybody–including an advertiser–can be a publisher via the Web and other digital media, why do advertisers even need to bother with the middlemen (i.e. newspapers, magazines, broadcasters–the ad-supported media) to reach audiences? Get a Web site or Twit or online campaign to go viral and you've bypassed the traditional channels. 

One might argue that you still need mass media to start the fire—that somehow, word has to get out that there's something great there, so that the virality can be stoked. Susan Boyle on YouTube, kindled by British TV and U.S. news reports (though those mostly came after YouTube), might be an extreme example. And maybe there still will be a role for media in focusing audiences for advertisers to reach. Maybe.

But I think we're going to see more examples of grassroots phenomena that spread on their own, without traditional media help, and advertisers figuring out how to take advantage of that to save themselves huge amounts of money in getting the word out. It's still a crude system (hell, so is advertising as we know it—remember, Wanamaker was an optimist!), but it's not hard to envision a world somewhere down the road in which advertisers are, well, no longer advertisers anymore, and decide they don't need the media middlemen. 

Uh-oh.

Choices in Charm City

What happens in a city when its newspaper dies? I've written about this question before, and it's a topic that more and more people are starting to discuss openly as big papers struggle. I continue to think the answer is something that would greatly surprise those who think newspapers are practically the only source of local news. There already are plenty of alternatives—and many more to come.

I spoke this week on a panel in Baltimore called "The End of Local News? If Communities Lose Newspapers, Who Will Fill the Void?" sponsored by the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. It was a particularly timely panel in Baltimore: The Baltimore Sun is pretty emaciated these days after multiple layoffs and cutbacks, and unfortunately it's one of those papers that shows up near the top of newspaper-watchers' private lists of big-city papers that appear to be particularly endangered. Baltimore could very well be a test case for questions posed in the panel's title, perhaps sooner rather than later. 

The other participants were an impressive bunch: Baltimore Sun Editor Monty Cook, former Editor Tim Franklin, WBAL-TV investigative reporter Jayne Miller and Baltimore African-American Publisher Jake Oliver. The moderator was Merrill College Dean Kevin Klose, former head of NPR (and a former colleague of mine at The Washington Post.) For the most part, not surprisingly, this august crowd with deep local roots couldn't even imagine a Baltimore without its Sun, and as a result there was a bit too much of the usual printie breastbeating about how only large metro newspapers can provide real local coverage.

Hogwash. And when my turn came to speak, I set out to prove it. For my presentation, I played show and tell: I cued up a couple dozen Web sites that already are providing coverage of Baltimore, right under the Sun's nose, and took the panel and audience on a rapid-fire tour of Baltimore's media ecosystem, circa 2009. It was hardly a comprehensive list—I'm sure I missed dozens if not hundreds of other blogs, hyperlocal sites, verticals and others that are already--and that's a key point—replacing the Sun as key sources of local information. Back to the panel's title: "Who will fill the void?" It's already being filled.

I've gotten some requests for the list of sites I showed, so I'll go straight to the examples and, as I did on the panel, let them do the talking, along with a bit of commentary about why I picked them:

I started with the Sun's site. It's your basic one-size-fits all metro newspaper Web site. Then I talked about other traditional media that have always provided local competition to the Sun, in print and broadcast: Miller's WBAL-TV, Oliver's Afro-American, the alt-weekly City Paper and Baltimore's excellent business and legal paper, the Daily Record. All cover communities, beats and stories the Sun doesn't get to—and have done so for years. Of course, I didn't even mention the other local TV and radio sites, ethnic papers, community weeklies, college papers, etc. These are longstanding members of the local media ecosystem in Baltimore that belie the notion that the metro daily is the only news and info source in town.

But that doesn't even begin to get to the newer players. I started with a handful of local news sites and blogs: Baltimore Brew, Baltimore Crime, Investigative Voice, BmoreNews, BlogBaltimore, InsideCharmCity. All of these are providing a window into Baltimore life; many are doing the kind of deep-dive local reporting that traditionalists seem to think is the exclusive province of metro newspapers. 

Then I pointed out some local vertical sites whose coverage areas map to (or go beyond) sections of the newspaper and serve specific local interests: Baltimore Real Estate Investing, Baltimore Injury Lawyer (whose "What's an Ear Worth?" headline got a big laugh), Gannett's MomsLikeMe and KidBaltimore. Local entertainment, nightlife and city guide sites: 600 Block, What's to Eat Baltimore? and Yelp, of course (which I think is now quietly doing the same sort of fundamental damage to local newspapers' entertainment, calendar and review franchises that craigslist did to classifieds a few years ago). And a couple from the endless list of local sports sites: CamdenChat, one of at least a dozen local fan blogs that covers and opines about the Orioles; and Baltimore Ravens, which I picked because it's a news and information site run by the NFL team, without any sort of journalistic filters. That's another new kind of competition for reader eyeballs the Web has made possible: direct publishing by the sources of news themselves. 

I showed some sites that aggregate local info: Localist; Examiner.com's local site, which pulls together bloggers and "examiners" writing about subjects inside and outside Baltimore (one of 60 such sites Examiner has built around the country, with so-so results, but uniquely positioned to move in with established sites if newspapers start to fail); Twitter, to show people talking about everything Baltimore (Twitter coverage of the panel is here, btw); and Outside.In, compiling content from myriad local blogs.

I also wanted to show the Baltimore audience that there's other interesting local work being done elsewhere: the terrific VoiceofSanDiego, which is doing the kind of local watchdog reporting that many journalists—including some on the Baltimore panel—somehow think can only come from newspapers, and its big-city counterparts around the country, like MinnPost, ChiTown Daily News. and the New Haven Independent. To show local community coverage on a smaller scale,  I trotted out Baristanet and WestportNow, two of the longest-running examples of the hundreds of hyperlocal sites now providing news and information for small towns. For a glimpse of what happens when technology is brought to bear on local information, I showed Everyblock and Fwix, with their unique ways of mapping voluminous local data and news.

As I said, this whirlwhind tour just scratched the surface—it literally took me only about 15 minutes on Google and Outside.in to find my local Baltimore examples, and I know that I missed many, many others (apologies to proprietors of those sites for the omission; hell, the list of blogs started by ex-Sun staffers is a whole category unto itself!). And there are plenty more examples to come—after the panel I spoke to an experienced local entrepreneur who's planning an ambitious Baltimore online news effort, and I'm sure he's hardly unique.

The point is that the question of who covers local news and information in a newspaper-less city is a moot point. The replacements already are serving the audience the paper used to have to itself, and there are more in the wings. Are there business models to support all of this new media? Not yet, but there's no doubt in my mind that new business models will emerge to support local news and information. And besides—and this really befuddles traditionalists—some of the people who run these upstarts sites aren't even in it for the money. They're providing coverage of their city and specific topics because they love the place where they live and the specific subjects they cover, not because they're motivated by profit. That's a very interesting turn of events, and especially tough for big-iron, expensive legacy media to compete with.  

Baltimore is hardly unique—the demonstration I did can be done effectively in any city. I strongly suggest that traditional media executives—and anybody who doubts that newspapers be replaced—spend some time trying to find and understand this new competition. It's out there, no question. There's more to come. The big-city daily newspaper, already on its heels, is hardly the only game in town. If and when it disappears, there will be plenty of replacements.

PS: Writing on Nieman Journalism Lab, Tim Windsor makes a clever point that the Baltimore symposium proved that events get covered even when newspapers don't cover them.

Who's Doing Good Work in Online News? (Part 1)

There's a lot of time being spent these days chasing old ideas for the online news business that seem new to some people. Meanwhile, lots of smart folks are doing some very good work in truly inventing the future of online news.

Some of these innovators work for traditional news organizations; others work for startups or Web-only operations. These are people who really do have good ideas for the future of news and advertising. Over the next couple of posts, I'm going to take a look at some of the efforts I've seen that seem to be the most interesting. 

I'm going to skim over a few things, like Twitter, that have quickly become mainstream, and try to concentrate on products and projects that are breaking new ground–and hopefully can become examples for others to replicate. Some are fairly well-known; others have been too obscure, in my view. But all of them should be more widely adopted. Just about every news site should be doing versions of every one of these, and more.

We're at a point where the news business really needs some bold, imaginative thinking in everything from news presentation to business models. These examples are some of the best of breed. (If you know of others, please add them in the Comments.) 

First, from traditional organizations, in no particular order:

• Maps are a powerful way to illustrate lots of information at a glance, and given the Google maps API, it's surprising that they're not used more by news sites to explain stories that literally cover a lot of ground. And not just stories: CinciNavigator, from Cincinnati.com, does a nice job of plotting local information ranging from news stories to crime to business listings to gas prices, all in one place. Obviously, this builds on the great work being done by Adrian Holovaty, first on ChicagoCrime.org and then on EveryBlock (more on that in the next post). But it's surprising that more news organizations haven't provided their readers with this service. Another example: WashingtonPost.com's LocalExplorer, which launched about the same time as the overhyped and disappointing LoudounExtra, and is actually much more useful–albeit more limited than CinciNavigator.  

• Another interesting use of maps: the Newseum's Today's Front Pages feature, which plots newspaper front pages on a map (a map with a weird East Coast bias, for some reason). WashingtonPost.com comes at something similar in a very different way with TimeSpace: World, a somewhat confusing mashup of news stories and photos overlaid over a world map. Both of these are actually riffs on work that was done at the MIT Media Lab in the early '90s on world news maps; it's nice to see a good idea finally making the mainstream of journalism!

• Stuck in a traditional one-size-fits-all mentality, many news organizations have had problems thinking about creating great niche sites to target specific audience segments. Gannett, however, has quietly built a network of local sites aimed at mothers that now has dozens of outposts under the MomsLikeMe banner. A recent redesign–which brought the initial sites onto a new platform under one banner–unfortunately cost the sites a lot of their personality. But the MomsLikeMe sites still do a great job of providing a forum where mothers can exchange information, tips, stories, whatever–and where advertisers can reach those moms. The format is much more like a community bulletin board than a traditional news site, with lots of user-generated content. That's a very good thing, because it means authenticity, participation, engagement–and inexpensive content.

• There was a time a few years ago when news sites went a little Flash-happy, creating all sorts of overdone interactive features that seemed to serve their designers' portfolios more than they did readers. Flashmania has calmed down a bit, thank God, and now multimedia presentations are deployed a little more judiciously. A great one is the Please Touch Museum site the Philadelphia Inquirer built to feature the city's new museum for children. Put together by a team led by Frank Wiese, the Inquirer's online projects editor, the site perfectly fits its subject: you want to touch it and find out what's going on. Nice work.

• A lot of print news sites have leapt into video, inspired by YouTube's success into thinking it's the Next Big Thing online. It may be, but not the way most news sites do it. Sure, it's great to put up video of news events, but too many sites try to emulate television and create high-production-value video reports that replicate TV news. Usually, these are boring, and readers avoid them like the plague. And then there's The New York Times' David Pogue, the tech reporter who's made a science out of creating witty, guerilla-style videos that trade overproduction for humor, substance and personality. The results are videos that, like the best of YouTube, get forwarded all over the place and viewed by literally millions of people. Rather than trying to out-TV TV, every print news organization should be showcasing newsroom personalities (and newsrooms always have their share of personalities!) in videos that will entertain as well as inform.

• Speaking of The New York Times, the paper's much-touted team of experimental web developers is doing work that's always interesting, if not always clearly useful. But that's what cutting-edge innovation often is. Two good examples: The enhanced New York Times Extra home page (to get there, click on the green Extra link below the logo; it's oddly not bookmarkable) and a map that tracked popular Twitter words during the Super Bowl. The latter was an interesting thought piece with no real utility, though one can imagine it being more useful for some other fast-breaking Twitter-led story. But the Times Extra home page, which adds related third-party links to Times headlines, is a very interesting example of moving outside the traditional walled garden of news sources and showing visitors what others are writing about the same subjects. Also worth a look: Blogrunner's Annotated New York Times, which takes the enhancement/aggregation idea a big step further. Update: The Times developers have added a blog with links to interesting projects and prototypes they're working on. Well worth a look.

• I'm a big fan of news aggregation; even as traditional editors are complaining about being linked to by Google or competitors, I think it's something every news organization should be doing to establish its site as a one-stop destination for everything on a topic, especially local news. Leverage your brand, local knowledge and editing skills to present readers with an aggregated package of stories and information from all sorts of sources–yes, even your competitors–and you'll be performing a service that goes far beyond whatever you can do with your own content. The NBC owned-and-operated stations have figured this out, and while I'd quibble a bit with the execution–they seem shy about giving source credit where credit is due–efforts like NBCWashington.com site are excellent examples of the power of aggregated local news. Honorable mention: Examiner.com, which has built sites in 60 cities to aggregate local news and supplement it with blog-like reports on specific topics from local "examiners." Examiner.com (on which I did some early strategic consulting) is a bit too tentative about taking advantage of third-party sources and a bit too overreliant on its "examiners" for content, but it's still building unique local franchises that compete directly with local newspaper sites.

• Tribune Co. has taken a lot of heat for some of its management's wacky ideas, but a couple of the Chicago Tribune's ongoing projects are real pathbreakers. TribLocal is probably the strongest effort yet at creating a hyperlocal site that combines professional and user-generated content; as a co-founder of Backfence and close follower of all things hyperlocal, I've watched TribLocal closely and with much admiration. It's expanded to more than 40 Chicago suburbs and seems to be getting traction with readers and advertisers. Tribune's other interesting endeavor is Colonel Tribune, maybe the single must unusual thing being done online by any major newspaper. Col. Tribune is a fictional character created by the Tribune as a sort of host of and guide to the newspaper site and, more significantly, a participant in social networks like Facebook and Twitter (where the colonel has 5,400 followers). If nothing else, the colonel gives a somewhat drab news site a touch of personality.  

• Somewhere between hyperlocal and aggregation is GateHouse Media's TheBatavian, an online-only local publication started from scratch in a small community in New York state. TheBatavian brings together a small professional staff, community-contributed content, links to other local media, user forums, a blog-like layout and aggressive pursuit of local advertisers to create a next-generation community news product that's well worth watching. GateHouse digital smart guy Howard Owens has said he's using just about everything he knows in creating and running TheBatavian, and that's a lot of horsepower. It's a good model for what might replace print newspapers in the months and years to come.

• We saw a lot of good Web work come out of the recent election; much of the best of it, like Politico and FiveThirtyEight.com, came from outside traditional news organizations (and will be covered in my next post). But the St. Petersburg Times fact-checked candidates during the campaign with its Politifact site, and has kept up the momentum with an ambitious project to track President Obama's campaign promises. The Obameter is keeping its eye on more than 500 promises, and grading the president on his ability to keep them–or not. Smart bonus: The Obameter is being syndicated as a widget that other news sites and blogs can add to their pages. This sort of thing should be the rule, not the exception, for interesting online efforts.

• The action in news and information innovation is not limited to the Web. The iPhone has quickly become an important delivery platform, and the smarter media companies have built iPhone apps that extend their product and brand to the palms of people's hands. There are a lot of news-related apps for the iPhone, and a lot of them are sadly mundane. But the Weather Channel–whose Web site has never dazzled–has a fantastic (and free) iPhone app that includes forecasts, videos, radar and just about anything else a weather junkie (or even a normal person) could want. Another great iPhone app from a sort of traditional media outfit is Major League Baseball's MLB.com AtBat, which combines scores, stats, video and other goodies into an essential tool for baseball fans; this season's version is said to add live radio broadcasts of games, too. Note to those who would like to see people pay for content: MLB gets $4.99 for AtBat, and it's worth it for such a well-done, useful product.

• And finally, so that we're not completely wallowing in editorial efforts, here's one from the revenue side. Cox has been launching Kudzu business directory sites around the country, and this is exactly the sort of thing that every media company should be building in its local market to tap into small-business advertising. (Disclosure: I did some consulting for Kudzu several years ago.) It's the tried-and-true Yellow Pages business model, with free basic listings plus upsells for enhanced information; readers can add business reviews, as well. But the coolest thing about Kudzu is its alternate Kudzu Virtual House interface, which provides a striking visual navigation of business categories in addition to the usual search and browse access. Again, multimedia used intelligently–with a revenue model, no less!

Coming in Part 2: Good work being done outside the traditional news organization mainstream. And again, please add to the Comments anything else that you think is particularly good and worth emulating. We need all the smart ideas we can get right now to move journalism forward, make it more attractive to more people and find business models to support it.

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All Or Nothing

On this day of national rebirth and renewal, some tough yet wise words about transformation for newspapers, broadcasters and other old-line media players from Diane Mermigas on the Seeking Alpha Web site:

There are no shortcuts for TV broadcasters and newspapers going digital. The internet's unique niche and scale economics must be adopted at every level of the media business to translate into sustained growth, profits and engagement with consumers and advertisers. ... It just takes courage to jump in all the way. If not now, when?

This echoes Marc Andreesen's similar advice from a couple months ago: You're simply not playing seriously–or succesfully–in the digital world as long as you're still primarily clinging to–and defending–your old business. 

It sounds radical, but to survive, media companies need to commit fully to online products and regard their traditional businesses as secondary. The focus has to be on making the online business model work–not on preserving a failing older model. Until that happens, media companies are going to continue to struggle with the transition–and, as Mermigas and others point out, consistently get beaten by more-focused competitors like Google, YouTube, Twitter, craigslist, Facebook or some startup you've never heard of...yet.